May 6, 2016

Week One Progress Report: Prototypes Coming Soon!

I’m now officially one week into my five month experiment, and I’ve already gained meaningful insight into how I work best, what distracts me, and how to overcome setbacks, both mental and business-related.

Time Management Takeaways:

Schedules are nothing more than suggestions. I’ve tired making hourly schedules three days this week, and I haven’t developed enough self-discipline to stick to them. I get caught up in finishing a project and fear that if I stop midway through, I won’t be able to pick up where I left off. This is a behavior I want to change.
Momentum is key. Tasks that take more than an hour to complete take me a anywhere from 15–25 minutes of working to develop a steady pace of progress. My goal is to shorten this “warm-up period,” to about five minutes.
Daily habits have tremendous influence on productivity. For the first time in a few weeks, I’m back to my daily routine: Mail & Bank at 11.00AM, Gym at 1.00PM, Leave the office at 5.00PM. My morning ends up being structured around my PO box run, afternoons around the gym, and later afternoons around going home. I’d like to add more daily habits to my daily schedule; maybe something like email from 9–10AM, social media setup from 12–1PM, and so on. I’ll keep you updated.

Business Updates

Education Ventures: This is more of an aside from what I want to be writing about, but because it took a huge portion of my time this week, I wanted to explain what I was doing. The process of winding down has been a bit more involved than I thought, because I wholeheartedly care about my students and their parents.

I find myself getting more excited about working with my Model UN students again. I think this is because I’m not worrying about the next round of recruitment. Regardless of what the cause is, it will be bittersweet. I’m going to video record everything this summer so that many of my lessons will exist online.

Whiteboard is still a thorn in my side, in some respects. I’m working to finalize the contracts with BU for housing, which is made unnecessarily complicated by schools not communicating their true plans. Since March, I’ve had over 40 students drop out of the YEC program. This complicates plans and makes me look unorganized to the university. This is a major part of why I’m backing out of this program in the future.

The 2014 YEC Class, the first class, was probably my favorite because it was validation of the program. I still keep up with many of the students from this class, and I’m working with Adam on Kickback Pants.

My failure to attract enough students to Founder’s Academy will haunt me. Again, drop outs played a big part, but the responsibility rests solely on my shoulders. I’m hoping I can persuade the three students that did sign up to accept my offer to work with me in July. I want to prove, to at least three students, that I can teach, coach, and motivate better than the best programs out there.

Now onto the updates on the four projects! I’m going to write updates in bulleted list format to keep posts shorter.

FollowAlong- Mobile Touring App

Improper Bostonian is going to running a feature piece on FollowAlong in their Getaways issue! As soon as the article comes out, I’ll post the link on whatever Medium post that I’m writing.
I found a drag-and-drop app creator to create the V1.1 prototype. Unfortunately, this means that the V1 prototype on Parse is garbage. Walking away from a sunk cost is tough but necessary in this case. The app creator runs on a subscription of $200/mo — much cheaper than spending $4K-15K on a new developer.
The one feature the app creator doesn’t have is a paywall (a pay screen to access content). This is a must for the prototype (explanation in video below). But they do allow you to embed webpages into the app as modules, so my thought right now is to use WordPress to create a mobile web app and embed it into the app creator.

Kickback Pants- #KilltheKhaki

Found a great video of two of the founders of Chubbies Shorts giving a presentation at HustleCon 2015. I got very excited when I started creating a strategy for Kickback Pants using their advice. An incredibly important lesson that I’ve learned: don’t re-inventing the wheel; copy other successes instead.
A personal point of frustration has been the total absence of progress over the past year. Now I’m going to take the reigns. I found pant samples from a manufacturer that shows promise and ordered four pairs in red, yellow, blue, and a peachy orange. I also started reaching out to local embroidery shops in Boston to get the pants transformed into Kickbacks.
I’ll be meeting with the business owner and the other advisor next week. My hope is to have samples to start our content push — which will mean more progress in 7 days from me than the company over the past 8 months. Frustration can be a great motivator.
I think there’s a lot of work to be done around developing the Kickback Pants brand. If we’re going to be authentic, the brand can’t be veneer deep; it has to connect on a deeper level and I’m not sure what that will be yet.

BattleCups- Master Level Beer Pong

Right: Version 1.2 of the prototype. Left: Version 1.3 of the prototype. The main difference is the height of the cup holder. I think V1.2 looks cooler because of the increased incline on the bow/stern pieces.

Found the 3D model files for the 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 versions of the prototype. As already discussed, the 1.3 version is too large for mass production. I think the smaller 1.2 version looks cooler, and it may be viable; I have a lot of work to do to find the right manufacturer.
I have access to a 3D printer in my office space and want to print a full set of the V1.2 prototype, but I have a few issues. (1) It’s going to take a long time for each piece to print — whatever, I can deal with that. (2) I have no idea how to open the files or use the printer — a slightly bigger issue. Any advice or assistance would be much appreciated!

beantrust. Club- Your Personal Coffee Curator

I’ve been working on the financial model for beantrust. Club more than anything else. The business model has to be viable for all parties before I can go into audience building.
I keep coming back to to the idea of selling Erik as the master coffee curator, which he is. My plan as of right now is to make this a premium, private club experience: $45/mo for a membership, must be purchased at 6-mo or 12-mo at a time, limited to the first 100 people, customers only accepted after that by personal referral from a member.
Each month, you’ll get either one large package of hand selected, curated coffees, gifts, goodies, and gadgets or multiple smaller packages throughout the month. You’re not buying into a “coffee of the month” subscription; you’re hiring Erik to be your personal coffee and tea curator.

Let me know what you think!

One of the reasons I’m documenting and sharing updates is leverage — God, I hate that word — the collective knowledge and feedback of everyone reading. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments, or angry rants (especially angry rants), message me on Facebook or leave a comment here!